Everything You Know About the Media Biz Is About to Change

The reason we spend so much time planning is because the consequences of making wrong media calls are very, very costly.

We could buy media against the wrong target, wasting millions of dollars ($4 million for a :30 in the Super Bowl, really?) We could miss a huge target opportunity or put the wrong message in front of a consumer who could care less. So, we plan and plan and plan. Media is just too costly for fumbles.

But now consider a system in which agencies can run a little bit of media and see what works before we buy/waste a lot of media. Oh, and this happens in real time. Meaningful responses are delivered in a matter of days and ideas are conceptualized, aired in digital media and performance analysis is deployed within a week.

Sadly we’re not there yet, but the day is coming soon when programmatic buying will change everything you know about the media business and data jockeys become the rock stars of the agency world.

Already there is a lot of evidence that programmatic buying and trading desks—the agency groups that are using programmatic buying—are transforming how we go to market. Real-time buying hasn’t truncated the planning season just yet, but it has made agencies far more efficient and effective in previously unimaginable ways.